NJFBOA - Home of New Jersey's Camaros and Firebirds - Do you think seat belts save lives?

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when we took an IED, that belt kept me in the truck and everyone else from flying around. Other cases here not so good. You talk about people getting ejected in car acidents through the front windsheild... now imagine the force to eject a person who DID have their seatbelt on through 3" think bullet proof glass.

I like this, SS. I vote yes, and everyone else riding in my car better be wearing one too for the exact same reason. I wish I knew how to post video or that I could look for video here at work without getting c-blocked by our firewalls. The British put out a pretty graphic commercial years ago about the necessity of everyone wearing seatbelts. It demonstrates a 25 mile per hour collision (Or whatever that translates to in kilometers, but my instructor told us it was 25) in which the backseat passenger, who is not wearing his belt, is thrown into the front seat passenger, who is. The force generated by the backseat passenger's momentum was compared to the force of an elephant charging. Backseat passenger hits front seat passenger hard enough to kill them both. Dramatic? Absolutely, but entirely possible.

Remember that everything in your car that isn't secured is a projectile, including loose change, CDs, the Club, even small glass breaking hammers. Any of these items hitting you in the back of the head, even at 25 mph, can do a lot of damage.

As for the seatbelts, yeah, they save lives. They're designed to. Jim makes a great point about old cars vs. new cars. In the good ole days, the Big Three built giant tanks with rigid frames. The old timers will say, "Ah, the cars all crumple up in a crash these days and my old Buick got hit by a semi-truck and all I needed was a new headlight!" For those who don't know or understand (And this being a car forum, there probably aren't too many but I'll say it anyway), newer cars are designed to crumple up like an empty beer can. This way, the car absorbs a large portion of the energy and velocity in a crash. The older cars, while bigger, were built so solidly that a serious crash had a higher liklihood to end in a fatality, seatbelt or no seatbelt, due to internal injuries suffered during the crash.

Take a good look at your seatbelts. They are webbed. That is because in a serious crash, the belts themselves will stretch slightly with the movement of your body. Again, this transfers more energy and greatly reduces internal injuries. After a serious crash, it's imperative that the seatbelts are replaced. If it's serious enough, you will actually be able to see where the seatbelts stretched.

How good are they in side impacts? Better than nothing. Sure, there are side impacts serious enough to intrude into the car and kill someone. In many of those instances (SS's story aside), there's a greater liklihood that without the seatbelt, getting tossed around inside the car will severely injure or kill you. And the whole "car catching fire and doors being stuck shut" thing? Yes, it can happen, but chances are also high here that injuries would be such that you may or may not be able to get out of the car anyway.

Now, onto Bubba's accident. If it's the one I recall seeing on here, he was a passenger in his own second gen Trans Am. If I remember correctly, the car went off the road and slammed into a tree. Without that seatbelt, Bubba's one amazingly lucky S.O.B. I'm 6'2". I would imagine that the seat belt probably rides along the side of Bubba's neck. While it can and will leave a nasty burn or even a laceration along the side of your neck, it's not going to break it. Wear the belt.